THR how professional secrecy has in vain spread to most professions and vocations

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Week 18

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The bartender may have been given and heard more than he bargained for, when he first sought and got the job, even 424-3890-type telephone numbers.

Motion: THR how professional secrecy has in vain spread to most professions and vocations
Role: PM (gov.)

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A hush or silence has slowly but surely descended on private and public affairs. We cannot talk about supersensitive or just plain sensitive stuff in the way we could decades and years ago. In the past, it was customary that there was a scandal, because there was a whistleblower, after which media outlets arrived like vultures to tear the flesh and bones of the object or subject of the scandal. Today, we are lucky if media outlets report verbatim what certain celebrities have themselves laid out on the internet on their Instagram accounts. There, scandals are thin on the ground. Nothing is being said sub rosa.

In the Beginning, Bankers, Doctors, Lawyers, Priests
An oath of confidentiality was at first the domain of but a few practitioners and protectors of sensitive information. The economical, juridical, physical and religious “SWOT matrices” (really, if you think about it) of people were guarded over by bankers, lawyers, physicians and priests. From the beginning, there has usually been the component of people or professions who have people or persons as their objects, points of departure and subjects as the grounds for professional secrecy.

However, an oath of confidentiality then spread to other, less important areas of human activities, such as hotels, offices and prisons. Today, civil servants, hotel concierges, and the police usually keep mum about the specifics of different cases and guests that they are dealing with. Especially with the police, it usually does not make any sense. If the suspect is apprehended, on “Riker’s Island” and under investigation, there is usually no reason why information about her or him should be withheld. Suspects do not have a cell phone to communicate with the outside world, they cannot interfere with the investigation, and the public is entitled to know about the hows, whens, wheres and whys of certain crimes and misdemeanours. Usually there is no need to protect the public from this information, inasmuch as their interest is merely curiosity, with which there is nothing wrong.

Now Most Professions and Vocations Have an Oath of Confidentiality
If the above was not bad enough, now more and more ways to support oneself fall under professional secrecy. Bouncers cannot tell what kinds of customers cause trouble. Cleaning women cannot tell what they find in their trash. Teachers cannot tell what happens in the classroom. And there is the juridical malady of non-disclosure agreements which crop up everywhere. According to them, participants cannot tell the media about abuses, incidents and rows that may have occurred between certain contract parties. It is a blocker against the free flow of useful information and serves only to let people save face, when they do not deserve that.

One case in its own right is the press and its source protection. It is grounded in the sense that the press needs to have access to sensitive information, but the downside is that the press, too, uses it just to further its own agenda. The press never tell lies, but their venality is in how they handpick what they show in photographs and tell in plain words. They reckon they never get caught spreading disinformation or misinformation, inasmuch as they tell a truth or two, without adding anything to them, but without telling the whole of truths. The source protection of the press is also, in a certain way, more a part of the problem than the solution.

We All Would Benefit From Less Professional Secrecy
My understanding is that these oaths of confidentiality should be lifted to most extent. If silence and whomever it is supposed to protect is not appropriate and defendable, silence should be revoked. Bring back the yesterday of acute scandals and chronic flow of muckraking.

Would there be any way to decide on what merits professional secrecy and what not? For instance, the determining factor could be whether it is a question of attacking downward or upwards, striking against the powers that be or someone who is already down. Or, alternatively, it could be about the thin green line between so-called professions and vocations. If you were a professional, you’d be entitled to professional secrecy. If you were someone in a vocation, you’d not be entitled to it. As simple as that.

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Perustelu(t)/puolustelu(t): Tässä puheessa tarvitsin apuja ulkopuolelta, kun en tiennyt, miten sanotaan “lähdesuoja” tai yleensä “vaikenemisvelvollisuus”. On kuitenkin kiitollista jättää tällaisia aukkoja puheeseensa, koska sanat voi selvittää kollegaltaan tai netistä. Tietämättömyyden takia ei kannata jättää käsittelemättä sanoihin liittyviä asioita, jos ne lankeavat luonnostaan paperille. Oletan, että vastapuoli käyttää tehokkaasti hyväkseen ajatusta herjauksesta tai kunnianloukkauksesta suurimpana syynä sille, miksi asioista vaietaan.

THS alternative theories as to why Arts curricula do not pay off

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Week 52

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* headnote
Arts in the context means roughly the same as “the humanities”, which will lead to a B.A. or M.A. degree in contrast to STEM subjects or disciplines, which in turn lead to B.Sc. or M.Sc. degrees, even though both lead eventually to Ph.D. degrees as the last step.

CURATING seems to lie at the heart of professions emanating from the Arts (or the humanities). Journalism is, lest we forget, also a type of curating, but the difference is that it is dynamic.

Date: 22 Dec 2020
Motion: THS alternative theories as to why Arts curricula do not pay off
Role: Minister or 2nd speaker (gov.)

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Over the years, studying the Arts* have been cavilled at on many occasions. They have been seen as a waste of time and a path that only leads to misery and unemployment. This is nothing new in recent history. While the Arts probably provided one with employment during the first half of the 20th century, during the second half of the same century the opportunity began to disappear and the situation became gradually worse and worse. It had to do with the hollowing out of the middle class, which must have begun even then, not as recently back in time as we would like to imagine.

I have a new theory, according to which the basic essence of many of the “Arts” is that it curates exhibits of the past for ever-renewing new audiences, that is, citizens born into any new generation. The arts have been tasked with teaching chestnuts of what WAS to those who live NOW. And, this appeals to a certain kind of people, those who are not entirely in tune with the times we are living in now. They choose a mindset that is static rather than dynamic, for any number of reasons. The Arts are a beacon that shines the light of history in its many forms and guises to town, nation and the world. Exactly what are we talking about when I regard the Arts as curating the past?

Art or Literary History Studies as Curating
My impression is that students of art history are expected to know the ropes and rudiments of their chosen art (books, images, music, plays, sculptures, videos) before they enter their curricula. I would also count among this lot those collectors and interior designers who study old and modern specimens of design and can name different objects such as a monoblock chair, Ceska chair or an Aalto vase. Regardless of the level of expertise, how much more do they have to know apart from cataloguing expertly art from different epochs? At the end of their studies, they are expected to have a good taste. Art and literary history graduates raise up certain key works of art from the past in their up-and-coming career at its peak and curate art in this way.

History or Philosophy Studies as Curating
History majors have a different brain from mine, and the best of them are able to amaze me with how they can conjure up the intricacies of a bygone era with a few slides or a few hieroglyphs with a chalk on the blackboard. For all that, the basic formula of erudition in history is simple: one knows the timeline and as much trivia as is connected and one can squeeze in on that timeline, not forgetting the twin arrows of cause and effect. One can speculate about history endlessly, but usually to no avail, as history has usually been written by the victors after a big struggle of two or more forces, something which will erase the opposite views, and the more time passes the harder it is to go back to a certain point in the past. Philosophy students, on the other hand, try to curate the past of philosophy in trying to show that there is a “red thread” that passes through each household philosopher, like an Olympic torch, up to today. Trying to prove that human thought is linear might be counterproductive, because we know that it is circadian, elliptical, repetitive and solipsistic, too. History and philosophy graduates raise up certain key events, facts and philosophers from the past in their up-and-coming career at its peak and curate thought and timeline in this way.

New & Old Language Studies as Curating
Language students begin their road to professionalism like any other pupils at schools, but little by little they get to know more words than the rest of the population. They collect words like stamps and try to remember the contours, colours and characteristics of each. Languages developed while technology at the same time was evolving only slowly, prior to the Epoch of the Enlightenment. Previous generations have decidedly decided what is the best way to refer to an object or a phenomenon, something which has sometimes required an arbitrary decision, sometimes a slow erosion, sometimes a portmanteau word union. Even though novel words emerge each year, the vast majority or words are very old, such as those pointing to nature, primitive tools or village life. New and old-language graduates raise up certain key words from the past in their up-and-coming career at its peak and curate language in this way.

We have to remember that there are also other Arts-like fields of inquiry that produce close to the same predicament. People studying information science, aiming to become librarians, are basically falling into the same “trap”. What are libraries if not places where a select few people are curating books? Often librarians literally curate those books in raising some of them up at the gable ends of shelves or special vitrines for people to see, acquaint themselves with and possibly borrow, in addition to their other duties cataloguing, coating and handling books and stuffing shelves with them. Usually their choices are erudite. Even if Information Science is not one of the Arts, but rather a social science, it could be one based on this description. Also, librarians’ pay checks are not very different to those of other poverty-riddled Arts professions, and thus they belong in the same crowd.

What this boils down to is that the Arts have a far narrower field to tend to than exact sciences. Sciences have always the potential to be radically enhanced, if they manage to open up a new avenue from or into themselves, even though it’s not that likely. Natural sciences, too, out of necessity have at their service a high number of mediocrities or untalented ones, who will never do better than to curate the best, past findings of natural sciences by abler colleagues to a new set of learners. Because the Arts are theoretically, on paper, at a disadvantage in “just curating stuff”, in not being dynamic as disciplines, they will most often be at the receiving end of the stick rather than carrot. That in terms of new vacancies/lay-offs and raised/lowered pay or promotion/demotion — when it comes to the prospects of the staff that manages that curatorship.

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Perustelu(t)/puolustelu(t): Asetelma on sillä tavalla ongelmallinen, että edeltävällä ja seuraavalla puhujalla ei välttämättä ole omaa omaperäistä lisättävää asiaan, jolloin minä jäisin ainoaksi “pajatson tyhjentäjäksi” eikä puhujajärjestyksellä ole täten väliä. Aloite on myös sillä tavalla ambivalentti, ettei siinä aluksi ehkä voi täysin nähdä käyttömahdollisuutta humanismin turhuuden alistuneeseen myöntämiseen, sillä selkäydinreaktio yleensä on, että vastaavassa tilanteessa pitäisi käydä hyökkäys- tai puolustuskannalle tekemään humanismin apologiaa. Myöskin opposition agenda ja kanta jää kysymysmerkiksi.